Page 2 of The Headmaster’s Binding

"You're the new Letters hire. Mercer."

"Thomas. Guilty."

"Elena Vasquez, history. I'm adopting you," she said. "It's decided, don't fight it. You'll want to know: the fish is safe, the sherry is a hate crime, avoid the Provost until he's eaten, and the man by the fireplace is your Headmaster, whom you should meet last."

"Why last?"

"Because he's the only interesting one," she said, "and you should eat first."

Item four, I did not write, because I was holding a sherry, but I filed it: everyone in this room knows where the man by the fireplace is standing without looking at him.

They did. It was a physical thing, like the room had a slope to it. Forty academics balancing plates, all of them tracking one fixed point with the backs of their necks.

I ate. I met the Provost (pre-food: confirmed mistake). I met a chaplain, two deans, a woman who ran the library like it was a small country, and a physicist who told me the fog was "a cold-air pool, perfectly ordinary" in the tone of a man who's been asked before. I drank one sherry to be polite, which was one more than the sherry deserved. And at some point the room's slope tilted me, the way it was always going to, to the fireplace.

Look. I'd seen the photo on the college website. Silver-templed, mid-career-distinguished, A. THORNE, HEADMASTER, fine. Website photos are taken by committees. What the website had not conveyed was that the man was six foot something of quiet in a dark suit cut the way suits are supposed to be cut and mostly aren't, standing with a glass he wasn't drinking from, watching his party like a harbormaster watching the tide, and that when the crowd opened and he turned to me, the eyes were the gray of the stone this whole place was built out of, and about as easy to move.

"Dr. Mercer." His hand came out. "Adrian Thorne. Welcome to Ashgrave."

I shook it. Dry, warm, the grip of a man who has never once had to insist on anything.

Here's what happened in my head, verbatim, because the notebook got it that night in full:

Item five: the Headmaster's hands.

Item six: delete item five.

I'm thirty-two years old. I have a doctorate. I have testified, under oath, essentially, before a committee, about the specific ruin that follows when you let yourself want somebody who has power over your paycheck. I watched a man I loved read a statement about me that his lawyer wrote, and then I moved four hundred miles with two suitcases. I have exactly one rule, it's written in scar tissue, and it is: never again with a boss.

So I put my glass down, and I looked at the most quietly attractive man I had ever stood in front of, my actual literal employer, and I did what I do when the ground's not safe.

I led with the geometry.

"Can I ask you something impertinent?"

"You may ask."

"Your east range." I tipped my head at the windows, where the east side of the quad was a gray suggestion behind fog. "It's off. Two degrees, maybe three, from everything else on the quad. I noticed on the walk in and it's been irritating me all afternoon."

His face did a thing then. Nothing moved; I'd swear in that same court that not one muscle moved. It happened anyway, like a lamp coming on behind a curtain.

"The college was built in stages," he said. "Over two centuries. By committees."

"By people who couldn't agree on north."

"That," he said, "is a fair summary of the institution."

And I laughed. Too loud for the room. I heard it go up into the beams and felt forty gowned heads turn, and I did not care even slightly, because his mouth had done a thing at the corner, a thing that was gone before it landed, and I had made it happen with two degrees of bad Victorian surveying.

Item six is under review.

"Consolation literature," he said, like we'd been talking about it all evening. "Your monograph. The committee's report called it 'unusually alive.'"

"That's committee for 'we expected it to be boring.'"

"It is." He turned his glass a quarter turn on the mantel, squaring it to an edge only he could see. "I read it in August. Your chapter on Boethius is wrong."

I stared at him. "It's the best chapter."